The future is bleak. If you are poor, you live in the middle ages.
Robert Sawyer paints a rosy picture worthy of a Microsoft demo, a soft pastel fuzzy description of a future world. Well, that sucks. In Gizmodo, Samford May depicts a much more painful situation,but while I do in principle agree with Samford's view, there are a couple of things that need to be addressed.
First of all, the future is a juxtaposition of all our past and miseries, not an uniform utopia. We see that everyday, in every street and in every corner of the world: WiFi coverage all over Manhattan, yet at the same time we have people that remain distanced from that same future, walking with their centuries old technologies: a watch, perhaps, and nothing else.
We see also that inequality in the distribution of wealth and how it affects the choices people may have in the adoption of that magical future: access to medicine, education, energy and political choices are severely limited for a big sector of the population: in this scenario it doesn't matter whether new technology can detect cancer or not, since its inaccessibility simply means that it doesn't exist for the people that needs it the most.
We can think about the magic of computers and the internet, the pervasiveness of communications, the continuous data flow that informs our lives, but what in reality happens is that we have a huge gap developing between those that have the access, and the wealth, to acquire that technology, and those that have to remain isolated from it, trying hard to manage without and resorting to practices and tools that were old two hundred years ago.
One dramatic example: while the US soldiers trample around the world in their high tech gear and incredible costly uniforms, their opponents resort to a rifle that is decades old. Latex boots are used in the tropical rainforest of South America, because they are widely available, cheap and untraceable. These are low tech, but also highly accessible to a larger percentage of the population.
These futures in which cars fly, our data is embedded in nice chips that we carry within our bodies, and apartments and cars are smart is simply ignoring economical realities. True, the technology to have all that might be available, say, having smart RFID tags that talk to all other tags inside the things you own, thus enabling a conversation of sorts - your car knows whether you need milk, and tells you so as you drive back home from work; your cardio monitor tells your fridge to have the gatorade Mk II ready, because you just went on a longer run; you walked past the Peace Convention at the local mall, and your TV-PC-whatever gets you all the relevant news, and even manages to snatch a picture of you and your car as you drove by; you even have the possibility of checking who has seen your pic and call your boss to tell them that you weren't that sick, just out and about.
That is all nice and good, but there are 90% of people in the world without access to computers and internet, and the gap grows wider. Famine, war and diseases are constant and more urgent preoccupations to such a large sector of the population that it doesn't matter that a few millions in the USA or a few hundred millions in China have access to a machine that changes their toilet paper, or that prints their news on a disposable electronic paper: you read it for a week, and then trash it.
Where it will matter is to that eight year old kid that has difficulty buying a pencil, and has to share a notebook with his sister and little brother. They have TV, of course, a three year old model, and are still paying for it. They most likely live in a small house, a room they share with adults, badly illuminated, and full of safety risks. Your Bluetooth that you use to have sex with strangers matters little to a kid that can not talk to his peers because a cochlear implant is out of the question, since her mother only makes minimum wage cleaning offices during the night. That little PDA that connects to your car and suddenly acts as GPS, recorder, mp3 library and all means nothing to a kid that has to walk to an underfunded school with not enough teachers, no music department, and no chalk for the boards.
See, this is my point. Unless you have a sizable available income,. say making at least $20.000 more than the average annual income in the USA, you are not going to indulge in $300 ipods, and the nice $3000 computer that needs it. Unless you can afford decent food, all those smart appliances that tell you what perfect recipe you have in your plate are completely superfluous.
The future as it has been defined in those articles is simply a banal exercise, a consumers' desire, a marketing ploy. Nothing else.
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